The Filter Introduces Responsive Radio As Echo Nest Replacements Step Up „The Filter, a „personalisation and relevance technology provider“ that includes Peter Gabriel as an investor, recently launched Responsive Radio as a „white label, personalised playlist generator for music streaming service providers.“ The new offering combines The Filter’s „taste profile engine“ with a new „adaptive playlist technology.““

The Wu-Tang’s self-defeating unique album „Lastly, and most importantly, the Wu-Tang Clan here are flying in the face of the very nature of music itself. Art and music are at two different ends of an important spectrum: art appreciation is fundamentally a solitary experience, which is one reason why people like to live with art in their own homes, and generally dislike overcrowded museums and galleries. Music, by contrast, is fundamentally a social experience. You might prefer small venues to large arenas — but you’d still rather go see a gig at a small venue than have a band play a set for you and you alone. That would be weird.

It’s true that recorded music is often enjoyed in a solitary manner, through headphones. But even then the shared experience is important: file-sharing sites exploded in popularity not only because they allowed free access to music but also because the first thing that you want to do, when you listen to something you love, is to share it with others. The world’s biggest recording artists, including the Wu-Tang Clan, don’t achieve success purely through the intrinsic value of their music; they achieve success through the way in which their music is loved and shared. The love of music is a fundamentally communal experience, in a way that the appreciation of fine art is not. To turn an album into a unique object, belonging to just one person, is to defeat the very nature of music and music-making. This model from the Wu-Tang Clan does nothing for the cause of “reviving music as a valuable art”, to use their words. Instead, it simply mummifies and fetishizes it. It’s silly, and I hope it doesn’t catch on.“

BandPage Raises $9.25 Million In New Funding „BandPage launched in 2010, becoming a hugely successful Facebook app. Surviving several major shifts in Facebook’s rules for apps, BandPage has continued to develop as a musician services platform, with 500,000 artist users. “We are in the musician business,” said J Sider, Founder and CEO of BandPage, “the business of driving revenue growth and expanding fan bases.““